I was lucky, if you can call it that, to have been stalked before the digital age. Nearly 30 years ago, a stalker had to rely largely on land lines and the U.S. mail to instill fear, and a stalking victim had to rely largely on herself and her friends for protection.

I've been thinking about stalkers a lot lately, because of the Erin Andrews case and especially because of continuing debate over whether Andrews somehow ``asked for it'' because of her hair and her clothes and her looks. I'm no Erin Andrews, nor was I 30 years ago. But an August 2009 report by the Department of Justice says that during a recent 12-month period, 3.4 million people ages 18 or older were victims of stalking. They can't all have been pretty blond women with high-profile television jobs.

I was stalked long ago, before there were reports on stalking, before we even had a name for it. I first met my stalker, a fellow journalism student, when he asked to interview me as part of a class assignment. We sat outside, he asked me a few questions, and that was it -- until his professor pulled me aside about a week later. She was worried, she said, about the tone of his story. She wouldn't show it to me, not because of privacy concerns but because she didn't want to upset me.

That was the beginning of two years of what I would describe as near-unrelenting hell. My stalker also wanted to be a sportswriter, so I saw him nearly every day, at every football and basketball practice, at every game, and of course every day in the halls of the J-school. I was always there, in the newsroom of the student paper, which had a glass front facing the hallway that led into the building. My stalker became a fixture at those windows, standing and staring in at me.

The phone calls started soon after. He never said a word. In fact, after the interview, he never spoke directly to me again, but he'd call nearly every night. Then the letters began -- and for the first time, I was truly afraid for my life.

The letters -- it's hard to talk about them, even after nearly 30 years. I learned later that my stalker was taking a religion class and a human sexuality class at the same time. The gist of what he had learned, apparently, was that God wanted us to have sex. I thought by now that sentence might make me laugh, but even now, all I remember is the terror of coming home at 2 a.m. from closing up the newspaper for the night and finding in my mailbox a 12-page letter -- handwritten, front and back, single-spaced -- containing graphic descriptions of God's wishes.

I lived with those letters, that wretched bundle of filth, in my cedar chest for 20 years before I finally got rid of them during my last move. Few people knew the entire story, and if something happened to me, I wanted the police to know where to look.

My friend Gene was with me one day when I pulled one of the letters out of the mailbox. He read it, and mobilized the troops. I wouldn't be left alone in the newsroom, ever. At practices, someone would always sit with me, at least one person and sometimes more. If I was seated near my stalker in the press box, the seating cards would be switched before the game to put as much distance between us as possible. One of the basketball players found out, and offered me a present: his switchblade, which he'd brought with him to campus from New York. I was tempted, but declined.

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